How Children End Up The Targets Of Sex Traffickers

April is child abuse prevention and awareness month, and normally its business as usual for someone whose job revolves around the prevention and awareness of child abuse. January is Human Trafficking Awareness month, when celebrities with cool hashtags and Instagram accounts raise awareness about human trafficking. Even though Im not a celebrity last January I was invited to write an op-ed and a local magazine gave me carte blanche to write about human trafficking each month, indefinitely. Seemingly, we cant possibly draw enough attention to human trafficking, but just in case that topic was becoming blase, Im seeing the term pedophile ring more and more on social media and in my daily google alerts about child sexual abuse.

For starters, some definitions:

Human trafficking means using force, fraud, coercion or minority in exchange for labor or sex.

Child sex trafficking is when one person receives money, goods or services in exchange for sexual contact with a minor of any age.

A pedophile ring, if the term is being correctly used, would be an organized system of accepting money, goods or services in exchange for sexual contact with a prepubescent child.

Pimps who traffic teenagers generally have the teenagers live with them and form a strong emotional bond with them. Thats how they have them do miserable work, take their money and return to them, night after night. Kidnapping is rarely a point of entry. Victims usually enter the life because they run away, are kicked out of their home or foster home, or are seduced away from home. Prepubescent children dont really run away, get kicked out or lend themselves to being seduced, making them harder to traffick than teenagers. This is why prepubescent children who are trafficked are almost always trafficked by a parent or foster parent.

Most people who sexually abuse children by forming a significant relationship with the child and slowly grooming them to desensitize them to touch and to keeping the abuse secret.

So why is the topic of sexually abusing children for cash so fascinating?

They have recycled the stranger danger of the 1980s. Whether they focus on protecting your kids form the dangers of social media or the dangers of shopping at Ikea, these undocumented, clickbait stories are now modern urban legends that reinforce the beliefs that strangers are the only people we need to worry about.

When people ask me what they can do to protect their children from traffickers, I want to say dont sexually abuse them. Dont let anyone else sexually abuse them. And keep them out of foster care. I dont actually say that, because very few parents intend for those things to happen to their children. But despite the belief that traffickers lurk behind every internet connection and Ikea couch, but based on the ACE study and the high estimate offered by experts in 2015, trafficking only represents 2.6 percent of child sexual abuse, and the things that make children vulnerable to traffickers are abuse and foster care.

Fixing major social problems and injustices isnt easy. But it isnt possible until we move past the salacious and sensational details. It isnt possible if we distort truths to quiet our fears and inadequacies. But if we work together, it is possible.